Anna Olenick

Graduate Counseling Intern 

Anna’s journey into the mental health field began as she started spending time with and mentoring teenagers with disabilities in 2012. The more time she spent there, she learned with certainty that relationships are the most important thing in this life we collectively live. As she delved into her own journey as a client in a counseling office, she came to have a passion for bringing the experience of the counseling relationship to her own friendships and giving others space to be known. Graduating in 2016 from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, she knew she would take these lessons into working with teenagers and young adults as she pursued non-profit work in the following years. As she spent more time doing so, she knew that getting a degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling was inevitable.

She began her degree in counseling in 2020 and has delighted in getting the opportunity to sit with clients in the sacred space that is the counseling office and work with the team of incredible practitioners at Genesis Behavioral Health.

Her ultimate desire is that her clients would find hope as they come to counseling and that she can be alongside them in it as they do. She particularly loves working with clients who are new to counseling, as her own experience was filled with a lot of apprehension and remembers the feeling well. She loves helping people find effective ways of communicating in relational stress, find meaning in their pain, healing in their story and agency in their life. Her experience with walking with others through grief has given her an affinity for climbing into the trenches with them.

When she is not in the office, she loves drinking cold brew at coffee shops, hiking, reading, writing, fine dining, trying new activities once and being asleep by 9. While not a native Texan, she has loved the familial feel of the Alamo City and eating conchas as it becomes her home.